text editor authors sabotaged their product, when they introduced "quote marks" and "copyright symbol" to their font files and text editor key bindings and ruined their product with additional features whose only purpose is to harrass pirates and make copyright owners life easier by making it easy to identify quoted text and copyright notices
By that logic, you committed copyright infringement when you used quotation marks in that paragraph.
you … avoid the question why your users don't flee from your offering when you support pirates (and terrorists)
A text editor can’t know if someone typing a terrorist screed into said editor is an actual terrorist or an author (fiction or non-fiction).
A pirate or a terrorist using a given piece of software for their own illicit acts does not mean the developers of that software support those acts (or those people). Trying to prevent such acts from being done in, say, a text editor like Notepad++ would require such a deep sabotaging of the program itself that said sabotaging would render the program useless to everyone.
That a text editor allows someone to use it for writing terrorist screeds—legitimate or fictional—does not inherently mean the developers of that program support terrorism. To believe otherwise is to believe in a leap of logic that defies all reason and sanity, especially when applied to meatspace tools that have a legal use but can also be used to commit unlawful acts (e.g., hammers).
My own experience is that 10-15 year olds can read "amiga hardware reference manuals"
Your experience is not universal.
While the tech environment has slightly changed after amiga times
That you still think Amiga is a worthwhile reference point for any reasonable benchmark of modern technology is…well, it’s a laughable idea, which is the kindest statement I can make on that matter. (It might also explain why you think late ’80s/early ’90s CGI is the highest possible achievement for Meshpage.)
I simply cannot assume that high school level kids are alot more stupider than what we did when we were young.
Didn’t you say you were marketing Meshpage towards preteens now? 🤔
how [do] you go from "preventing copyright infringement" to "sabotaging software"?
Notepad++ and other text editors allow for the free and unfettered input of text. To prevent any and all copyright infringement from happening in those programs, the devs of such programs would have to intentionally sabotage the functionality of said programs. How they do so is irrelevant; that they would have to do so is important.
Your entire plan for making software devs responsible for infringement hinges on the idea that those devs should do anything and everything they can to prevent infringement from even being possible with their programs. But in doing that, the functionality of those programs becomes limited at best and non-existent at worst. After all, who the hell would use a text editor that won’t let them type anything into it or a graphics editor that won’t let them draw anything on a digital canvas?
When it's clearly stated in the law that copyright infringement is illegal, technology vendors will need to do all they can to prevent those misuses.
Outside of supernatural magic, willful sabotage, or any other form of wishful thinking, how can Notepad++ tell if what I’m typing into it is an infringing use of someone else’s work or a Fair Use–protected quote within a larger original work?
You keep saying that people need to prevent “misuses” of their tech. But the only way to do that for certain is to prevent user input of any kind—at which point the tech becomes useless. You wouldn’t even be able to develop Meshpage if the editors you use for that job were sabotaged to prevent user input for the sake of pleasing the Copyright God.
Otherwise you're supporting illegal activity?
No. No, I am not.
The people you're talking about do not start avoiding your software once they find out that you're supporting terrorists and copyright infringers?
Someone who makes a text editor doesn’t “support[ ]terrorists and copyright infringement” if terrorists and pirates use that text editor as part of their unlawful acts. I mean, the manufacturer of the car that killed Heather Heyer didn’t support her murderer by making the car in the first place. You and I both know that is a bullshit argument meant to inflame emotions and make people ignore the underlying faulty logic of the claim. I know you’re a troll, but fuck, you could at least try to be less transparent about it.
That “stuff” also intentionally sabotages software, and once people find out the software has been sabotaged, they won’t want to keep using it. Your master plan has a flaw the size of the Grand Canyon, and it’s called “you don’t think about other people”.
One problem with your “solution”: When the server dies, the content dies with it—and people don’t generally like being told they don’t own things they’ve purchased with the intent of owning.
Your solution also doesn’t account for files downloaded from, say, a USB thumb drive. So again, I ask: Without resorting to supernatural magic, technological self-sabotage, or other such wishful thinking, how could a computer possibly know which one of two files was downloaded illicitly if neither file has DRM and both files are exactly the same?
there's always tech solutions like this available if you truly want to prevent these use case
But unlike you, who has no problem with hurting other people for fun, companies don’t tend to sabotage their own hardware for the sake of copyright. That would make them bleed customers, who will happily go find non-sabotaged tech from competitors and use that instead.
Again: Technology and context don’t really blend well together. Shooting part of your own movie in a dimly lit room and filming a movie off a screen in a dark theater can look similar through the lens of a camera. How could that camera ever tell the difference between those contexts without being supernaturally aware of the context in which it’s being used?
Again: How could a computer know, absent any DRM attached to either file, which file is the legal copy? You’re doing that thing again where your solution to copyright infringement is “intentionally sabotage all legal uses of technology so no one can infringe upon anything ever, not even by accident”—and that isn’t a viable strategy for anyone. Find a different strategy or shut the fuck up.
Let’s say I purchase and legally download a PDF copy of an ebook that has no DRM. Now let’s say I download an illicit copy of the same ebook in the same format. How can a computer magically know which copy is legal if both copies are the exact same file and neither copy has any DRM?
if you need 2 cubes, you still need to figure out how to create or clone one
That’s why tutorials and online support exist: If someone can’t figure it out on their own, they can find help from people willing to help. (Unlike you, who would apparently kill people over TCP/IP if you could if they ever asked you for any help with Meshpage.)
Technology doesn’t do context. You can’t make a camera that can differentiate between a legal use (filming your own movie) and an illegal use (filming someone else’s movie in a theater)—it’s so technically improbable as to be practically impossible. Hell, for all your crowing about Meshpage being able to suss out infringing works from legal ones, you still didn’t catch how you ripped off Scott Cawthon until I informed you that you had done an infringement. (Congrats, Tero, you’re as much a criminal as you think every other infringer is.)
So featuresets do not matter, only development time?
Otherwording aside: Excluding claims of theoretical functionality like being able to stop copyright infringement (which you couldn’t even stop yourself from committing with Meshpage!) what can Meshpage do right now that Blender can’t do? Because from where I sit, Blender can do far more than Meshpage will ever be able to do.
Maybe we should drop the features and just idle during the development, so that we gain dev time without actually implementing features?
And you called me lazy for not falling for your negging…
if some poor developer used 15 years of his life to make blender reality, then that's the true cost of blender
There may be at least one developer that has been developing Blender since the beginning. But unlike you, they didn’t mind working with other people—which means they weren’t alone across that span of development time.
I’m sorry your efforts with Meshpage have amounted to nothing, but projecting your failure onto others by acting like someone being part of a development team for a successful piece of software has wasted their life by working with others for years is…well, it’d be hilarious if it weren’t so goddamned depressing to see you hate yourself this much.
And really, all the bitching about Blender is ultimately projection on your part. You couldn’t hack it as a developer, so rather than admit the truth, you shittalk your “competition” and claim shit like “they wasted years of their life developing this thing” or whatever. You say your program can make a cube easier than Blender, but when confronted with the fact that Blender gives you a cube right out of the gate, you go eerily silent. Everything you keep saying as a criticism of Blender and its development team is an indictment of yourself—of your failures, your hatred for other people, your self-loathing. I mean, my God, would you even be trolling people on Techdirt right now if you didn’t hate yourself to the point where you thought trolling people on Techdirt was a good use of your time? (I hate myself, too, but at least I’m self-aware of the damage I’m doing to myself by continuing to argue with you.)
Count the real impact to the world, do not look just the money.
Okay:
Blender is a well-known, widely used, inconceivably powerful piece of software that anyone interested in 3D graphics can legally download and modify without financial cost.
Meshpage is an almost entirely unknown piece of software that no one has any interest in, and the only place anyone talks about it is on a blog where its creator trolls people by acting like someone with early onset dementia.
Far more creative works—more tangible additions to culture and society, for better or for worse—have been made and will be made with Blender than with Meshpage. When the history of 3D graphics is written, Blender will have at least one full chapter, but Meshpage won’t even warrant a one-line footnote in an appendix. If and when development on Blender stops, that software will be long remembered as a useful program; when you die, nobody will even think once about Meshpage.
the only reason why emulator exist is to run existing copyrighted games
Format-shifting is legal in my neck of the woods (so far as I know), so if someone has the tech to dump the ROM of an NES game they own to their computer, they can use an emulator to play that legally obtained ROM. That the vast majority of people use emulators to play illegally obtained games is irrelevant. Even if I were to grant that format-shifting is or should be illegal (and I don’t), emulation and ROM distribution is still the best way of keeping alive thousands of games from decades past.
given that the emulators were designed for piracy, they're illegal to develop or distribute over internet
A tool can have uses both legal and illegal, but those illegal uses don’t make the tool itself illegal per se. Someone can use a DVD/Blu-ray ripper, which technically has to break copy protection for the sake of ripping content, to legally format shift the content of a given disc into a digital form for storage in a non-distributed personal media collection. A hammer can be used to hammer nails or people’s skulls; that people use it as a weapon doesn’t invalidate its use as a tool for carpentry/furniture assembly.
game developers do not need the emulator at all
If they’re developing a game for an older system or a ROM hack for an older game, they do need an emulator. (ROM hacks are questionably legal, but I’d argue that they fall under either the parody or criticism/critique exceptions of Fair Use.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the Micro Mages crew used an NES emulator to make sure their game would work within all the limitations of the NES before they tested the game on an actual NES.
Note that there are emulators which are legal. But those do not have large collection of pirate games available as rom files which emulator enables users to play.
No emulator does. Unless they’re distributed with ROM packs, emulators don’t come pre-loaded or pre-packaged with ROM collections regardless of the system. RetroArch, for example, is a front-end for multiple emulators—but it doesn’t come with, and doesn’t have an option to help people find, actual ROMs for any of the systems it can emulate.
meshpage/gameapi builder is struggling with the same problem, given that .obj and .gltf files are standard file format which could possibly enable pirated 3d objects to be used with the tooling
It already did, in your case. Or do you not remember how you ripped off someone who ripped off Scott Cawthon’s work, despite your insistence that your program would prevent all infringement and you yourself were so opposed to infringement that you would prevent all input to your program to prevent any possible infringement?
[I]'ve decided that the piracy ecosystem with .obj files isn't significant enough (and it isn't the only alternative source of models) that it's still legal to develop the technology
So, what you’re saying is that even though the tool has an illegal use case, it also has a legal use case that justifies its continued existence? 🤔
By your own admission, you literally closed off the source code of Meshpage because other people tried to edit it.
my way or the high way
This is why only a handful of people, at best, will ever use Meshpage: Nobody wants you telling them exactly what they can do with an application meant to help them unleash their own imagination.
If they wanted piracy use-cases, those were rejected.
If they wanted legitimate cases, you’d still reject them because of the potential of copyright infringement. After all, you’ve said before that you would intentionally sabotage your own software to prevent any input from being entered into it to prevent copyright infringement. (Don’t say otherwise; we can look at your comment history.)
Given how you’d basically be saying “fuck you if you try to use this like Blender” to anyone who uses Meshpage, for what reason would anyone in their right mind use Meshpage and deal with a complete asshole like you when both Blender and its diverse support community are available to them?
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
By that logic, you committed copyright infringement when you used quotation marks in that paragraph.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
A text editor can’t know if someone typing a terrorist screed into said editor is an actual terrorist or an author (fiction or non-fiction).
A pirate or a terrorist using a given piece of software for their own illicit acts does not mean the developers of that software support those acts (or those people). Trying to prevent such acts from being done in, say, a text editor like Notepad++ would require such a deep sabotaging of the program itself that said sabotaging would render the program useless to everyone.
That a text editor allows someone to use it for writing terrorist screeds—legitimate or fictional—does not inherently mean the developers of that program support terrorism. To believe otherwise is to believe in a leap of logic that defies all reason and sanity, especially when applied to meatspace tools that have a legal use but can also be used to commit unlawful acts (e.g., hammers).
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Your experience is not universal.
That you still think Amiga is a worthwhile reference point for any reasonable benchmark of modern technology is…well, it’s a laughable idea, which is the kindest statement I can make on that matter. (It might also explain why you think late ’80s/early ’90s CGI is the highest possible achievement for Meshpage.)
Didn’t you say you were marketing Meshpage towards preteens now? 🤔
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Notepad++ and other text editors allow for the free and unfettered input of text. To prevent any and all copyright infringement from happening in those programs, the devs of such programs would have to intentionally sabotage the functionality of said programs. How they do so is irrelevant; that they would have to do so is important.
Your entire plan for making software devs responsible for infringement hinges on the idea that those devs should do anything and everything they can to prevent infringement from even being possible with their programs. But in doing that, the functionality of those programs becomes limited at best and non-existent at worst. After all, who the hell would use a text editor that won’t let them type anything into it or a graphics editor that won’t let them draw anything on a digital canvas?
Outside of supernatural magic, willful sabotage, or any other form of wishful thinking, how can Notepad++ tell if what I’m typing into it is an infringing use of someone else’s work or a Fair Use–protected quote within a larger original work?
You keep saying that people need to prevent “misuses” of their tech. But the only way to do that for certain is to prevent user input of any kind—at which point the tech becomes useless. You wouldn’t even be able to develop Meshpage if the editors you use for that job were sabotaged to prevent user input for the sake of pleasing the Copyright God.
No. No, I am not.
Someone who makes a text editor doesn’t “support[ ]terrorists and copyright infringement” if terrorists and pirates use that text editor as part of their unlawful acts. I mean, the manufacturer of the car that killed Heather Heyer didn’t support her murderer by making the car in the first place. You and I both know that is a bullshit argument meant to inflame emotions and make people ignore the underlying faulty logic of the claim. I know you’re a troll, but fuck, you could at least try to be less transparent about it.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
That “stuff” also intentionally sabotages software, and once people find out the software has been sabotaged, they won’t want to keep using it. Your master plan has a flaw the size of the Grand Canyon, and it’s called “you don’t think about other people”.
On the post: Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?)
Fuck me sideways, so do I. This is a sign of the Apocalypse, isn’t it.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
One problem with your “solution”: When the server dies, the content dies with it—and people don’t generally like being told they don’t own things they’ve purchased with the intent of owning.
Your solution also doesn’t account for files downloaded from, say, a USB thumb drive. So again, I ask: Without resorting to supernatural magic, technological self-sabotage, or other such wishful thinking, how could a computer possibly know which one of two files was downloaded illicitly if neither file has DRM and both files are exactly the same?
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
But unlike you, who has no problem with hurting other people for fun, companies don’t tend to sabotage their own hardware for the sake of copyright. That would make them bleed customers, who will happily go find non-sabotaged tech from competitors and use that instead.
Again: Technology and context don’t really blend well together. Shooting part of your own movie in a dimly lit room and filming a movie off a screen in a dark theater can look similar through the lens of a camera. How could that camera ever tell the difference between those contexts without being supernaturally aware of the context in which it’s being used?
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Again: How could a computer know, absent any DRM attached to either file, which file is the legal copy? You’re doing that thing again where your solution to copyright infringement is “intentionally sabotage all legal uses of technology so no one can infringe upon anything ever, not even by accident”—and that isn’t a viable strategy for anyone. Find a different strategy or shut the fuck up.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
No. No, it isn’t.
Let’s say I purchase and legally download a PDF copy of an ebook that has no DRM. Now let’s say I download an illicit copy of the same ebook in the same format. How can a computer magically know which copy is legal if both copies are the exact same file and neither copy has any DRM?
On the post: Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?)
Damn, even Lodos gets it, and he’s a Trumpist.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
That’s why tutorials and online support exist: If someone can’t figure it out on their own, they can find help from people willing to help. (Unlike you, who would apparently kill people over TCP/IP if you could if they ever asked you for any help with Meshpage.)
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
What do you think people generally use emulators for, playing only homebrew games? 👀
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Your software having a legal use doesn’t make it a good piece of software.
On the post: Internet Archive Would Like To Know What The Association Of American Publishers Is Hiding
Nothing says “something fishy is going on here” like trying to prevent discovery in a legal proceeding.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Technology doesn’t do context. You can’t make a camera that can differentiate between a legal use (filming your own movie) and an illegal use (filming someone else’s movie in a theater)—it’s so technically improbable as to be practically impossible. Hell, for all your crowing about Meshpage being able to suss out infringing works from legal ones, you still didn’t catch how you ripped off Scott Cawthon until I informed you that you had done an infringement. (Congrats, Tero, you’re as much a criminal as you think every other infringer is.)
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Otherwording aside: Excluding claims of theoretical functionality like being able to stop copyright infringement (which you couldn’t even stop yourself from committing with Meshpage!) what can Meshpage do right now that Blender can’t do? Because from where I sit, Blender can do far more than Meshpage will ever be able to do.
And you called me lazy for not falling for your negging…
There may be at least one developer that has been developing Blender since the beginning. But unlike you, they didn’t mind working with other people—which means they weren’t alone across that span of development time.
I’m sorry your efforts with Meshpage have amounted to nothing, but projecting your failure onto others by acting like someone being part of a development team for a successful piece of software has wasted their life by working with others for years is…well, it’d be hilarious if it weren’t so goddamned depressing to see you hate yourself this much.
And really, all the bitching about Blender is ultimately projection on your part. You couldn’t hack it as a developer, so rather than admit the truth, you shittalk your “competition” and claim shit like “they wasted years of their life developing this thing” or whatever. You say your program can make a cube easier than Blender, but when confronted with the fact that Blender gives you a cube right out of the gate, you go eerily silent. Everything you keep saying as a criticism of Blender and its development team is an indictment of yourself—of your failures, your hatred for other people, your self-loathing. I mean, my God, would you even be trolling people on Techdirt right now if you didn’t hate yourself to the point where you thought trolling people on Techdirt was a good use of your time? (I hate myself, too, but at least I’m self-aware of the damage I’m doing to myself by continuing to argue with you.)
Okay:
Blender is a well-known, widely used, inconceivably powerful piece of software that anyone interested in 3D graphics can legally download and modify without financial cost.
Far more creative works—more tangible additions to culture and society, for better or for worse—have been made and will be made with Blender than with Meshpage. When the history of 3D graphics is written, Blender will have at least one full chapter, but Meshpage won’t even warrant a one-line footnote in an appendix. If and when development on Blender stops, that software will be long remembered as a useful program; when you die, nobody will even think once about Meshpage.
How’s that for some real world impact?
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Format-shifting is legal in my neck of the woods (so far as I know), so if someone has the tech to dump the ROM of an NES game they own to their computer, they can use an emulator to play that legally obtained ROM. That the vast majority of people use emulators to play illegally obtained games is irrelevant. Even if I were to grant that format-shifting is or should be illegal (and I don’t), emulation and ROM distribution is still the best way of keeping alive thousands of games from decades past.
A tool can have uses both legal and illegal, but those illegal uses don’t make the tool itself illegal per se. Someone can use a DVD/Blu-ray ripper, which technically has to break copy protection for the sake of ripping content, to legally format shift the content of a given disc into a digital form for storage in a non-distributed personal media collection. A hammer can be used to hammer nails or people’s skulls; that people use it as a weapon doesn’t invalidate its use as a tool for carpentry/furniture assembly.
If they’re developing a game for an older system or a ROM hack for an older game, they do need an emulator. (ROM hacks are questionably legal, but I’d argue that they fall under either the parody or criticism/critique exceptions of Fair Use.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the Micro Mages crew used an NES emulator to make sure their game would work within all the limitations of the NES before they tested the game on an actual NES.
No emulator does. Unless they’re distributed with ROM packs, emulators don’t come pre-loaded or pre-packaged with ROM collections regardless of the system. RetroArch, for example, is a front-end for multiple emulators—but it doesn’t come with, and doesn’t have an option to help people find, actual ROMs for any of the systems it can emulate.
It already did, in your case. Or do you not remember how you ripped off someone who ripped off Scott Cawthon’s work, despite your insistence that your program would prevent all infringement and you yourself were so opposed to infringement that you would prevent all input to your program to prevent any possible infringement?
So, what you’re saying is that even though the tool has an illegal use case, it also has a legal use case that justifies its continued existence? 🤔
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
No. No, they did not.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
By your own admission, you literally closed off the source code of Meshpage because other people tried to edit it.
This is why only a handful of people, at best, will ever use Meshpage: Nobody wants you telling them exactly what they can do with an application meant to help them unleash their own imagination.
If they wanted legitimate cases, you’d still reject them because of the potential of copyright infringement. After all, you’ve said before that you would intentionally sabotage your own software to prevent any input from being entered into it to prevent copyright infringement. (Don’t say otherwise; we can look at your comment history.)
Given how you’d basically be saying “fuck you if you try to use this like Blender” to anyone who uses Meshpage, for what reason would anyone in their right mind use Meshpage and deal with a complete asshole like you when both Blender and its diverse support community are available to them?
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